In CSCW, phrases such as ‘shared goal’ or ‘shared understanding’ are often used to
denote what is taken to be a defining feature of cooperative work or at least what is
thought to be an essential precondition of the orderliness without which cooperative
work in practice is impossible; that is, these terms are used in an explanatory function
[e.g., 1; 6].
To take but one example: In one of her articles on ‘situation awareness’ the muchcited
Mica Endsley posits: ‘In a smoothly functioning team, each team member shares
a common understanding of what is happening on those [Situation Awareness] elements
that are common — that is, they have shared situation awareness, which refers
to the overlap among the SA requirements of the team members.’ However, she prudently
adds, ‘The concept of shared mental models is not universally heralded’ and
‘The development of shared mental models has not been the subject of much research’
[4, pp. 48, 52 f.].
A ‘shared situation awareness’? A ‘shared mental model’? What does she mean?

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The medical record, the collection of notes and other documents concerning a
particular patient, is a time-honored and robust institutional artifact. However,
with patients with chronic ailments that typically are treated and monitored by
multiple clinical workers, sometimes at different institutions, the medical record
is more than ‘beginning to burst’: it is beginning to fragment.
This becomes clear from our ongoing study of the coordinative practices of
clinical workers dealing with patients with ‘implantable cardioverter-defibrillators’
(ICDs), i.e., pacemakers that dub as defibrillators....